In “Existence special: Cosmic mysteries, human questions,” New Scientist grapples with critical questions like Marcus Chown’s “Am I a hologram? (25 July, 2011):
It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.
Whose hologram? Read More ›
From “Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children but Not in Chimpanzees
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011)” (ScienceDaily, July 22, 2011) we learn:
Adult humans produce a vast majority of their resources in cooperative work with others. Moreover, they generally try to distribute them based on norms of fairness and equity. With regard to children, previous studies have shown that when adults provide rewards as a windfall and ask children to share, 3-year-olds behave rather selfishly.
However, the present studies show that even 3-year-olds do take note of whether or not rewards were produced collaboratively, which in turn affects their tendency to allocate the toys equally.
Chimpanzees, however,
From “Does religion rot teenagers’ brains?” (MercatorNet, 25 July 2011): Recently, we looked at a claim, published in a serious science journal, Intelligence, that belief in God correlates worldwide with lower IQ. From the same journal in the same year, we learned that religion correlates with lower IQ among American teenagers. [ …] If half of the Catholics and Baptist teens are sporadically observant and doctrinally indifferent (no unusual state of affairs), religious orthodoxy collapses as a predictor of IQ. So it is not clear just what Nyborg is measuring. Social class is a possibility. More. Follow UD News at Twitter!
In “Norway Killer Cultural Christian, Practical Darwinian” (July 24, 2011), we learn from Creation-Evolution Headlines a bit of the background to World News Daily’s bringing the Darwinian leanings of the Norway killer to light: WND first started challenging the depictions of Breivik as a Christian on the 23rd. Then on the 24th, WND posted the entire Breivik manifesto and described him as a Darwinian, not a ‘Christian’ in the usual sense of someone who believes in Jesus Christ the Son of God and submits to Him as Lord and Savior. For example, Support for Darwinian ideas can be seen in several places in his manifesto: While arguing against the feminist destruction of marriage, he said, approvingly, “Marriage is not a Read More ›
The NSF has been taking polls of students for decades, asking whether they believed in Evolution and The Big Bang. They dropped that question this year, because it was getting too many “false negatives”, people who were well-educated but didn’t believe in one or the other. This drives some science educators nuts, who want naturalism and science to be equated to each other. The reluctance to buy into evolution is well-documented, but perhaps you are a bit fuzzy about the Big Bang reluctance. A news item this week reveals just how uncertain these cosmology theories are, but don’t tell that to the NSF. Here’s the scoop on the Big Bang. Back when Einstein was alive, he wanted his field equations Read More ›
As anyone who cares knows, members of the Darwinist establishment aggressively and shamelessly promote the lie that Intelligent Design is nothing more than Scientific Creationism hiding behind another name. Since they cannot make a credible case for their own position, they seek to discredit ID by misrepresenting its arguments. Hence, they resort to the cheap and dishonest trick of characterizing the science of intelligent design as “ID/Creationism,” an exceedingly clumsy formulation that is both illogical and unhistorical. In fact, the two approaches are radically different in their epistemological framework for arriving at truth. Creationism moves forward: that is, it assumes, asserts or accepts something about God and what He has to say about origins and then interprets nature in that Read More ›
In “Longevity Paper Retracted: A study that identified several genes linked to extremely long life has been retracted due to technical errors in the sequencing chips used,” Tia Ghose reports for The Scientist (July 21, 2011): For instance, one requirement that Science says the authors didn’t meet was the replication of the original paper findings in a separate sample of 100-year-olds. But the journal didn’t require the original paper to include a replication sample, Barzilai said, so it’s unclear why it’s needed now. In addition, finding a new sample of centenarians to confirm their original results is unrealistic, given that only about 1 in 6,000 of us makes it to 100, Barzilai said. True, but most centenarians can be found Read More ›
Don Johnson, author of Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, will be on a speaking tour: A West-Coast fall tour starting in the Northwest on Oct 22, ending in Southern California on Dec 6 (with an Arizona excursion Nov 14-17). More details will be available when the “Programming of Life” DVD is released around Aug 1. More. Don Johnson has earned Ph.D.s in both Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and in Chemistry from Michigan State University, was a senior research scientist for 10 years in pharmaceutical and medical/scientific instrument fields, was an independent computer consultant for many years, taught 20 years in universities in the US and Europe, and since “retiring,” has done consulting, speaking Read More ›